Pseudo-Protests and Serious Climate
Crisis

"You
elected this president. You reelected this president. . . .
Stop being chumps!" --Van Jones

Going in,
I was of mixed views regarding Sunday's rally in Washington,
D.C., to save the earth's climate from the tar sands
pipeline. I still am.

Why on a Sunday when there's no
government around to protest, shut down, or interfere
with?

And why all the pro-Obama rhetoric? Robert Kennedy,
Jr., was among the celebrities getting arrested at the White
House in the days leading up, and his comment to the media
was typical. Obama won't allow the tar sands pipeline, he
said, because Obama has "a strong moral core" and doesn't do
really evil things.

As a belief, that's of course
delusional. This is the same president who sorts through a
list of men, women, and children to have executed every
other Tuesday, and who jokes about it. This is the guy who's
derailed international climate protection efforts for years.
This is the guy who refused the demand to oppose the tar
sands pipeline before last year's election. If he had been
compelled to take a stand as a candidate there would be no
need for this effort to bring him around as a lame
duck.

As a tactic, rather than a belief, the approach of
the organizers of Sunday's rally is at least worth
questioning. For one thing, people are going to hear such
comments and take them for beliefs. People are going to
believe that the president would never do anything really
evil. In which case, why bother to turn out and rally in
protest of what he's doing? Or if we do turn out, why
communicate any serious threat of inconvenience to the
president? On the contrary, why not make the protest into a
campaign rally for the president through which we
try, post-election, to alter the platform on which the
actual candidate campaigned?

The advantage to the
expect-the-best-and-the-facts-be-damned approach is clear.
Lots of people like it. You can't have a mass rally without
lots of people. The organizers of this event are not
primarily to blame for how the U.S. public thinks and
behaves. But, then again, if you're trying to maximize your
crowd at all costs, hadn't you better really truly maximize
it? Sunday's rally probably suffered from being held on a
bitterly cold day, but I suspect that most people who
planned to come did come; and I've seen more people on the
Mall in the summer for no reason at all, and many times more
people on the Mall in the winter for an inauguration (which,
in terms of policy based activism, is also nothing at
all).

What if the celebrities generating the news with
arrests at the White House were to speak the truth? What if
they committed to nonviolently interfering with the
operations of a government destroying the climate? What if
they committed to opposing the Democratic and Republican
parties as long as this is their agenda? What if they said
honestly and accurately that the personality of a president
matters less than the pressures applied to him, that this
president can do good or evil, and that it is our job to
compel him to do good?

Sunday's rally, MC'd by former
anti-Republican-war activist Lennox Yearwood, looked like an
Obama rally. The posters and banners displayed a modified
Obama campaign logo, modified to read "Forward on Climate."
One of the speakers on the stage, Van Jones, declared, "I
had the honor of working for this president." He addressed
his remarks to the president and appealed to his morality
and supposed good works: "President Obama, all the good that
you have done . . . will be wiped out" if you allow the tar
sands pipeline.

The pretense in these speeches, including
one by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, was consistently that
Obama has not already approved part of the pipeline, that he
is guilty of inaction, that the government is failing to
act, that what's needed is action -- as if our government
were not actively promoting the use of, and using vast
quantities of fossil fuels, not to mention fighting wars to
control the stuff.

Van Jones ended his remarks by
addressing himself to "the next generation." And this is
what he had to say: "Stop being chumps! You elected this
president. You reelected this president. You gave him the
chance to make history. He needs to give you the chance to
have a future. Stop being chumps! Stop being chumps and
fight for your future, thank you very much."

Reading these
words, one would imagine that the obvious meaning they carry
is "Stop electing people like this who work for parties like
this and serve financial interests like these." What could
be a more obvious interpretation? You elected this guy
twice. He's a lame duck now. You've lost your leverage. Stop
being such chumps!

Nothing could be further, I think, from
what Van Jones meant or what that crowd on Sunday believed
he meant. This was a speaker who had, just moments before,
expressed his pride in having worked in Obama's White House.
The fact that this crowd of Obama-branded "activists" had
elected him twice was not mentioned in relation to their
chumpiness but as grounds for establishing their right to
insist that he not destroy the planet's atmosphere. They
would be chumps if they didn't hold more rallies like this
one.

Wait, you might ask, doesn't everyone have the right
to insist that powerful governments not destroy the earth's
atmosphere?

Well, maybe, but in Van Jones' thinking, those
who committed to voting for Obama twice, no matter what he
did, and who have committed to voting for another Democrat
no matter what he or she will do, deserve particular
attention when they make demands. Paradoxically, those who
can be counted on regardless, who demand nothing and
therefore offer nothing, should be the ones who especially
get to make demands and have them heard and
honored.

Needless to say, it doesn't actually work that
way.

Our celebrity emperors attract a great deal of
personal affection or hatred, so when I suggest an
alternative to packaging a rally for the climate as a
belated campaign event, it may be heard as a suggestion to
burn Obama in effigy. What if there were a third option,
namely that of simply demanding the protection of our
climate?

We might lose some of those who enjoyed burning
Bush in effigy and some of those who enjoy depicting
themselves as friends of the Obama family. But would we
really lose that many? If the celebrities and organizers
took such an honest policy-based approach, if the
organizations put in the same money and hired the same
busses, etc., how much smaller would Sunday's unimpressive
rally have really been?

(And couldn't such a crowd be
enlarged enough to more than compensate for any loss, by the
simple tactic of promising ahead of time to keep the
speeches to a half-hour total and to begin the march on
time? I'd pay money to go to that rally.)

The
problem, of course, is that the celebrities and organizers
themselves tend to think like Obama campaign workers. It's
not an act. It's not a tactic aimed at maximizing turnout.
And it's not their fault that they, and so many others,
think that way.

But imagine a realistic, policy-based
approach that began to build an independent movement around
principled demands. It would have the potential to grow. It
would have the potential to threaten massive non-cooperation
with evil. It would have the energy of Occupy. It would have
the potential to make a glorious declaration out of what now
appears to be self-mockery when oversmall crowds of hungover
campaign workers shout "This is what democracy looks like!"
as they plod along a permitted parade route.

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